Marit Törnqvist receives Johannes Vermeer Award 2024
24 September 2024
The Johannes Vermeer Award 2024 goes to illustrator and children's book writer Marit Törnqvist. The jury, chaired by Marise Voskens, unanimously nominated her. Törnqvist receives the award for her exceptional artistic ability to depict universal emotions in language and drawings, and to bring them close to the reader's world of experience. The Johannes Vermeer Award is awarded for the first time to an artist who primarily focuses on children and young adults.
“Marit's work breathes a free and open way of thinking, social compassion and a love for people of all ages. Seemingly simple, always recognisable and striking, sometimes longing, sometimes surreal, always beautiful, ”the members of the jury commented.
The Dutch State Award for the Arts, established by the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, will be awarded on Monday 4 November 2024 at the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague by Eppo Bruins, Minister of Education, Culture and Science.
Marit Törnqvist was born in 1964 in Uppsala, Sweden. She moved to the Netherlands at the age of five. She studied illustration at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Today, she is a celebrated illustrator and children’s book writer, and her oeuvre has many highlights. In 1995, Törnqvist made her debut as a writer with the book Small story about love, for which she was awarded a Silver Stylus. Since then, writing has become an increasingly important part of her work. For this, she has received the Silver Stylus twice in recent years, for The Happy Island (2018) and Turtle and I (2023).
In 2017, she compiled an anthology of Dutch children’s literature translated into Arabic, Farsi, Turkish, Somali, Tigrynia and Kurdish under the title A book for you, of which ten thousand copies were distributed in asylum seeker centres as a welcome gift to children in their own language.
Marit Törnqvist’s books have been translated into thirty languages. Törnqvist lives in the Netherlands and Sweden.
About the Johannes Vermeer Award
The Johannes Vermeer Award, state prize for the arts, is instituted to honour and encourage outstanding artistic talent. The award consists of a sum of 100,000 euros intended for the realization of a special project within its own field of activity. The organisation of the award is in the hands of the six national cultural funds, with the Mondriaan Fund as the lead agency. The award is intended for artists working in the Netherlands and across all disciplines, ranging from dance to design, from fashion to music, from painting to literature.